THE TIPPING POINT

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DEPT. OF DISPUTATION about the application of what epidemiologists call the "tipping point"--the point at which an ordinary and stable phenomenon--a low-level flu outbreak, for example, can turn into a public-health crisis. Today, bringing epidemiological techniques to bear on violence is one of the hottest ideas in criminal research.... Writer describes the part of New York City that the Police Department refers to as Brooklyn North, where neighborhoods slowly start to empty out... Tells about East New York, home of the 75th Precinct, a 5.6 square mile tract where some of the poorest people in the city live... East New York is not a place of office buildings or parks and banks, just graffiti-covered bodegas and hair salons and auto shops.... In 1993 there were 126 homicides in the Seven-Five, as the police call it. Last year there were 44. There is probably no other place in the country where violent crime has declines so far, so fast. Once the symbol of urban violence, NYC is in the midst unprecedented transformation. According to the preliminary crime statistics released by the F.B.I. earlier this month, New York has a citywide violent-crime rate that now ranks it 136th among major American cities, on a par with Boise, Idaho. Car thefts have fallen to 71,000, down from 150,000 as recently as 6 years ago. Burglaries have fallen from more than 200,000 in the early '80s to under 75,000 in '95... What accounts for the drop in crime rates? William J. Bratton--who as the New York City Police commissioner presided over much of the decline from the fall of 1994 until his resignation this spring--argues that his new policing strategies made the difference: he cites more coordination between divisions of the NYPD, more accountability from precinct commanders, more arrests for gun possession, more sophisticated computer-aided analysis of crime patterns, more aggressive crime prevention. Tells about the social science definition of epidemics... Tells how epidemics do not follow linear patterns... What does this have to do with the murder rate in Brooklyn? Quite a bit, as it turns out, because in recent years social scientists have started to apply the theory of epidemics to human behavior... Tells about the "broken window" hypothesis & about gang-related homicides in L.A. County as an epidemic... Writer interviews Mark L. Rosenberg of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta about endemic crime... Perhaps Brooklyn--and with it New York City-- has tipped.